Insurgent's Story Sheds Light On Foreign Intervention

FALLUJAH — He first tried to get to Iraq in April 2003, when U.S. troops established control over the country and jihad became a place on a map.

"I wanted to come and fight for Islam," said Abu Thar, who started the journey from the capital city of his native country, Yemen, across the Arabian Peninsula. "I met a Jordanian merchant who provided me with tickets to Syria and a hundred dollars. He even drove me to the airport himself."

He arrived at the airport in San'a, the Yemen capital, with group of other Yemeni students, a flock of would-be jihadis forming a neat line at the immigration counter. Abu Thar was wearing a traditional Arab robe and a small turban.

"And when the police asked me why I was going to Damascus, I said, `To work.' They asked me what kind of work. I said, `To work for the salvation of my soul.' And they sent me back."

A thin young man with an aescetic manner, Abu Thar fingered the fabric of his cheap cotton trousers. By his reckoning, the Western clothes were what finally got him started on the smugglers' road to Iraq, in time for the showdown in Fallujah.

If foreign fighters are the primary stated reason U.S. troops this week commenced the largest combat operation since the fall of Baghdad, the journey of Abu Thar sheds a rare light on their presence in Fallujah.

His story was related two days before the start of fighting, in a soft voice sometimes drowned out by the percussion of artillery shells. The specifics of Abu Thar's story could not be confirmed. But its broad outline -- of a kind of underground railroad channeling young Arab fighters into Iraq -- is consistent with other accounts, and the declarations of U.S. and Iraqi officials.

The manner of the individual relating them, moreover, was sincere in the extreme. Abu Thar, a nom de guerre, said that the day after he was turned away at the airport, he returned to his job driving a minibus taxi in Yemen's capital city. His passion was the study of Islamic law, or sharia.

Abu Thar, 30, might never have tried again to reach Iraq but for the photographs that emerged of U.S. military police abusing prisoners at Abu Ghraib. Seeing the photos, his wife, also a religious student, urged him to leave everything and go to Iraq to fight jihad. She was pregnant with their sixth child.

"She told me if they are doing this to the men, imagine what is happening to the women now," Abu Thar recalled. "Imagine your sisters and I being raped by the infidel American pigs."

He started making the rounds of friends, borrowing money to travel. From the Jordanian man, he got airline tickets to Syria. From the university where he studied sharia, run by a senior Yemeni cleric, he got the name of a man in Aleppo, a city in northern Syria, who would arrange for him to be smuggled into Iraq.

"I just told my wife. I borrowed a car from a friend, and we went out to do some shopping. She bought me two trousers and a shirt. We went then to my father's house. I told my mother, "Forgive me if I had done anything wrong.' She said, `Why?' I told her, "Nothing, I just want forgiveness from you and Dad."

She asked me if I was going to Baghdad. I said no. She hugged me and cried."

Back at his own home, he had a final dinner with his wife and children, who went to bed without being told their father was leaving. "My favorite daughter came and sat in my lap and slept there. She opened her eyes and said, `Daddy, I love you.'"

He was weeping openly now, a thin man with a thin beard in a courtyard in Fallujah.

"You know these memories are the work of the devil trying to soften my heart and bring me back home," he said.

By the time he reached Damascus, the word from jihadi networks was that the Syrians had tightened security on the border with Iraq. For weeks, he waited, moving from safe house to safe house. In each place, he said, he found himself quarters with another dozen young men making their way to Iraq. Eventually, he reached Aleppo, near the border.

There, he said, he met a young cleric who promised to help. He spent two weeks waiting in a small house filled with other jihadis. One night seven weeks ago, he was taken to a village on the Syrian side of the border. The border police were paid to look the other way.

"They came and said we are crossing today. It was a very scary journey. We had to lay still in the desert if we heard American helicopters.

"We spent two nights on the border in a village, then we were taken to another village to be given military training. Most of the brothers with me have never used a weapon in their life. I knew how to use an AK-47.

"After a few days they came and said we need fighters to go to Hit," a city on the Eurphrates River halfway to Baghdad.

In Hit, he found himself in a trench beside other Arab fighters, believing his dream of martyrdom was within reach. But a cease-fire was called and the Arabs were smuggled east.

In Fallujah, Abu Thar was assigned to a group called Monotheism and Jihad, headed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. He was assigned with 11 other men, only three of them Iraqis. They were in a safehouse in the Jolan neighborhood, where Marines entered behind heavy tanks.

"When I was in Syria, I bought seven copies of this," he said, pulling a pocket-size copy of the Quran from his jacket. "I wrote the name of my wife and my five children on each and left the seventh empty."